Well, when the US invaded Iraq, the only thing disapproving Western nations had courage to do is to produce a bunch of unsubstantiated weasel words and empty gestures.
It seems to me completely normal that the US was less sanctioned by "the West" when they invaded Iraq than how Russia was sanctioned when they invaded Europe.
I'm not American and I opposed the invasion at the time, but it was harder to argue because Saddam's Iraq had very few redeeming qualities, had been waging aggressive wars of its own, and its main role in international trade was as a member of the OPEC cartel.
Whereas Ukraine, for all its problems, is a far more democratic county with far more friends, no history of aggression, and a critical source of food for many nations.
If Russia had invaded Belarus or Tajikistan instead of Ukraine, I doubt there would have been any real consequences.
War making is the universal party in the US.
This is like shouting at a wall.
So let’s demonstrate near the White House and the Kremlin. I assure you both outcomes are different. Let’s set up a fund that allows me to criticize the government, pretty sure I can do that in the US, and good luck doing that for Russia.
You get the idea. There is definitely a difference.
This depends on what one finds importand and what not. My wife says, for example, that there is no difference except for nature, climate and a few minor thigs.
I say - there is more than a few differences, but still two countries have more in common than people think.
>let’s demonstrate >I assure you both outcomes are different.
If the result if the same (the government changing or not changing its policy or decisions) than there is no difference.
Yes in one scenario you may end up dead (and not necessarily in Russia) but this is not what's important here.
yet I fail to see any single example in recent US history where citizen action has been able to stop a war in foreign lands. They were not even to stop an actual invasion of Iraq, so let me question the point of potential protests.
You don't need to speculate. There were no real consequences when Russia invaded Georgia, and that's even a democracy, although unfortunately too small to be relevant.
I was there marching in DC and even my close friends and family (in suburban DC) seemed to be unaware of the protests. I thought, surely, with 100,000 people protesting in the city, Black Bloc hanging from streetlights, speeches from celebrities, Jesse Jackson, a former Defense Secretary, etc., that it would pop up on the local news. I never heard about it.
How is this substantial?
I don't get it. If all you do is give speeches and march, what is even the incentive?
At least that's how I understand the idea.
It obviously doesn't always work, and in some cases simply cannot work. It does work sometimes, to an acceptable degree, but often it doesn't.
It's like gambling. You win a bit and you start overestimating your chances to win more. Here, too - you petition local authorities to put a speed limit on a road near an elementary school, you "win", the speed limit is introduced, and now you think you can do the same to influence the massive, incredibly complex system of hundreds of millions of people, the machine that's steamrolling through geopolitics and history full-speed ahead. Of course you can't - that's work for decades, generations, thousands of leaders, millions of supporters. But, nobody wants to put their whole life behind what they want (or don't want), sacrificing their well-being for uncertain result 40 years down the line. Nobody wants to be a Stallman - he reads web pages by sending an email to home server which cURL-downloads the page and sends it back to him to read... in lynx. How many people are willing to go through so much inconvenience just to state a point? And do so for decades?
So, instead, people go protest a bit, virtue-signal their discontent (or support) on social media, get into heated discussions at family events - and then go on with their lives.
The basic premise is good: people don't change their views easily, so to make a change, you need to exchange people. It's good on a local scale, but it totally breaks above that level, in multiple well-researched scenarios, most of which happen to currently, and concurrently, play out almost everywhere. Normally, we'd have a war - a serious war with tens of millions of casualties - that would cut off the bloat and really reset (though leveling it would take some work, given all the bomb craters) the playing field. We don't, and won't, because of nukes. I honestly have no idea what's next - I just hope that I'll die before the more dystopian future arrives.
I often see this mentioned and I don't really get it. What did people actually do besides voicing their concerns and cozily waiting for the next election cycle?
Oh wow, people understood that their country is waging a war on the other side of the planet, hooray! What did they do about it exactly? Look at Assange's sorry state.
At least Russians had balls to burn some military enlightenment offices.
Western protests (except French, French are cool) are basically fun festivities.
How exactly would that proceed in your imagination ?
What makes me cringe is the fact that people pose as this is some kind of a virtue. C'mon, these people live in an environment where protests are not only unrestricted, they are endorsed to some degree as a vent-out method that allows people to feel good about themselves, and governments to continue their bloody business, so people can simply excuse themselves on the next election cycle, while profiting from the spoils of war.